1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to personal audio devices such as headphones that include adaptive noise cancellation (ANC), and, more specifically, to architectural features of an ANC system in which a secondary path estimating response is trained using ambient noise.
2. Background of the Invention
Wireless telephones, such as mobile/cellular telephones, cordless telephones, and other consumer audio devices, such as MP3 players, are in widespread use. Performance of such devices with respect to intelligibility can be improved by providing noise canceling using a reference microphone to measure ambient acoustic events and then using signal processing to insert an anti-noise signal into the output of the device to cancel the ambient acoustic events.
Noise canceling operation can be improved by measuring the transducer output of a device at the transducer to determine the effectiveness of the noise canceling using an error microphone. The measured output of the transducer is ideally the source audio, e.g., downlink audio in a telephone and/or playback audio in either a dedicated audio player or a telephone, since the noise canceling signal(s) are ideally canceled by the ambient noise at the location of the transducer. To remove the source audio from the error microphone signal, the secondary path from the transducer through the error microphone can be estimated and used to filter the source audio to the correct phase and amplitude for subtraction from the error microphone signal. However, when source audio is absent, the secondary path estimate cannot typically be updated. In particular, at the beginning of a telephone conversation, the secondary path estimate may be incorrect and there is no source audio available for training the secondary path estimate until downlink speech commences.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a personal audio device, including wireless telephones, that provides noise cancellation using a secondary path estimate to measure the output of the transducer and that can adapt the secondary path estimate independent of whether source audio of sufficient amplitude is present.